Last summer, Sunlight created a feature that allowed you to email your lawmakers as easily as a friend. One year later, we are still improving it by creating new illustrations to enhance the experience.
Continue readingThe House opens up to open source
Lawmakers that want to use open source solutions — which are restriction-free, reusable and frequently more cost-effective — usually can't. But all that may be about to change.
Continue readingIn Utah, conflict of interest disclosure available with a click
Utah is prominently publishing conflict of interest information online for all state lawmakers.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Visualizing campaign finance data like never before
One of Sunlight's OpenGov Grantees is building a groundbreaking new visualization of who gives money to federal politicians.
Continue readingWhy is cleaning messy data so hard?
What's the best way to clean up information when it comes in many shapes and sizes? We aim to find out.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Crowdsourcing state and local transparency
While many local governments offer public records, disclosure is inconsistent and not standardized. California Common Sense encountered this problem — and devised an interesting solution.
Continue readingSystem administration for junior devs: Using NGINX to handle HTTP requests
Presenting Part III of the junior developer's guide to system administration, where we will take a networked Web server and make it respond to HTTP requests at that same IP.
Continue readingThe public rally in support of Politwoops
It's been an intense 24 hours here at Sunlight: We've been mystified and saddened by Twitter pulling the plug on Politwoops, but we've been incredibly gratified by the support we've received from the entire opengov community.
Continue readingEulogy for Politwoops
In 2012, Twitter allowed Sunlight to curate deleted tweets from lawmakers and those seeking elected office in an effort to preserve this public record. But last night, all that changed when Twitter pulled the plug on Politwoops for good.
Continue readingIlluminating the jargon of criminal justice data with Elasticsearch
Working with criminal justice information has led to new challenges for Sunlight developers. Using a tool called Elasticsearch, we're cutting through the newfound jargon to produce a useful criminal justice database.
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